Point of sale (POS) terminal systems are used in restaurants, hotels, stadiums, casinos, as well as in retail establishments. The conventional application of the POS system and network is at the check-out counter on an aisle where people place items that are to be purchased from a supermarket or department store. The cashier or terminal operator rings up each item on the terminal and obtains a total. The charges for items are read by appropriate readers from the barcodes on the items. From original cash register terminals, these POS terminals have evolved to permit multiple applications (giftcard, credit card, driver's license verification, age verification, check verification, etc.). Despite these advances, most current POS terminals continue to operate with a two state cash drawer: open/close, with the opening of the cash drawer breaking a switch to thereby transmit all accumulated data for the transaction to the POS system administrator where all transaction and ancillary data are stored in a POS system database.
System administration for POS terminals is set up at many levels in the networked system. For a retail store, the system administration may be on a first level at a POS system controller that correlates all of the data accessed from a row of checkout terminals and has the correlated data stored in associated databases. The POS store controller may be at a node in a hierarchy of store system controllers that are correlated by an appropriate hierarchical next level business administrator or correlator. The business levels in the POS business hierarchy may, of course, include regional, national and even global levels.